Nigeria Case Law

A Stolen Governor's Phone, a Prisoner Running a Scam, and the Man Who Just Lent His Bank Account: Yusuf v. State Case: Yusuf v. State [2026] 11 NWLR 297 (SC) Court: Supreme Court of Nigeria Can you be guilty of fraud if you never spoke to a single victim, never impersonated anyone, and only did one thing — hand over your bank account details when a friend asked? This 2026 Supreme Court decision says yes, and it's a sharp reminder that criminal liability doesn't require being the mastermind. Sometimes making yourself useful to someone else's scheme is enough. A Stolen Phone Becomes a Fraud Operation The story starts with a stolen phone — specifically, the phone of the then-Governor of Osun State, taken in Oshogbo in November 2010. Somehow, that phone ended up in the hands of a man already sitting in Ikoyi Prisons awaiting trial. He'd been incarcerated there once before, years earlier, and had struck up a friendship with a prison warder during that stint. When he r...

Notice of Appeal, Cross-Appeals, and the Limits of Technical Objections: The Procedural Holdings in Tourist Co. v. Neo-Vista Properties Case: Tourist Co. (Nig.) Ltd. v. Neo-Vista Properties Ltd. [2022] 15 NWLR 317 (SC) Court: Supreme Court of Nigeria This is a companion piece to our earlier post on the substantive land dispute in this case. That post covered the merits — competing grants, revocations, and an abandoned counter-claim. This one is for the practitioners: a closer look at the roughly two dozen procedural holdings the Supreme Court worked through before ever reaching the substance, most of them centred on a single respondent's attempt to knock the appeal out entirely on a notice-of-appeal technicality. The Objection That Triggered All of This The respondent's central procedural argument was straightforward on its face: the appellant's notice of appeal, filed both at the Court of Appeal and later at the Supreme Court, didn't list the names of every party wh...

Two Years of Revocation, Two Different Grantees, and a Government Land Dispute: Tourist Co. v. Neo-Vista Properties Case: Tourist Co. (Nig.) Ltd. v. Neo-Vista Properties Ltd. [2022] 15 NWLR 317 (SC) Court: Supreme Court of Nigeria Government land allocation disputes in Abuja have a reputation for getting complicated fast — multiple grantees, revocations, re-allocations, and years of litigation to sort out who actually holds a valid title. This 2022 Supreme Court decision is a textbook example, wrapped around a plot of land in the Central Business District that ended up with at least three different claimants across a decade of paperwork. It's also a genuinely useful case for understanding how much a party can lose simply by failing to back up their pleadings with actual evidence. A Plot, a Revocation, and a String of Re-Grants The land at the centre of this dispute — Plot 25C (also referenced as Plot 1053), Zone A0, Central Business District, Abuja — had a genuinely tangled hist...

A Grant of Land That Was Never the Grantor's to Give: Romaine v. Romaine Case: Romaine v. Romaine [1992] 4 NWLR 650 (SC) Court: Supreme Court of Nigeria Two men, both claiming descent from the same 19th-century patriarch, fighting over a single property in Onitsha. One side says the other's ancestor was merely a servant, not a son. The other side counters with a foreign tribal custom nobody had ever proven in a Nigerian court before. And in the middle of it all, a landlord family hands out the same piece of land twice, decades apart, to two different people. This 1992 Supreme Court decision untangles all of it — and along the way delivers one of the clearest illustrations you'll find of why you can't give away something you've already given away. One Grandfather, Two Rival Grandsons The land at the centre of the dispute — No. 20 Emejulu Street, Onitsha — was originally owned outright by the Mgbelekeke family, who had granted it out under a customary arrangement c...

  Man sold Land Mid-Lawsuit — And Still Won It: The Twist in Osidele v. Sokunbi Case: Osidele v. Sokunbi [2012] 15 NWLR 470 (SC) Court: Supreme Court of Nigeria Here's a scenario that sounds like it should sink a plaintiff's case immediately: partway through suing someone over a piece of land, he turns around and sells that very land to a third party. Surely that means he's given up any right to keep fighting for it? This 2012 Supreme Court decision says otherwise — and the reasoning behind it is a fascinating look at how the doctrine of lis pendens actually protects, rather than punishes, a plaintiff who tries something like this. A Long Chain of Title, Traced Back to a Court Auction The land in dispute sat at Ikeja, Lagos. Its story began back in 1943, when a court-ordered public auction resulted in a certificate of purchase — the kind of document a court issues to confirm someone bought property through a judicially supervised sale — being issued to a man named Shitt...